Lives: Past and Present
by Artemis1292
Summary: Victoria Carnahan tags along with her cousins on the adventure of all time, literally. She's just a normal girl, so why does she keep dreaming about Ancient Egypt, and why does she feel attracted to a certain Med-jai? Ardeth/oc Rating may change. Bad sum.


**Author's Note:** Well, I've done it again. I keep getting these great ideas for new stories, and I keep putting off finishing my others. It's a very bad habit of mine. Oh well, I've been on a _Mummy_ kick lately, you know, watching movies, reading fanfiction, and I just had to whip this out. Originally this general idea would probably have worked a bit better with the TMR timeline, but that leaves me with less time to do things that I want with it. Let's just assume that Evy has been having dreams, or as we know, memories, of her past life as Nefertiri, but she just thinks that they're regular dreams induced by her avid study and fascination with the time period. My character is not a Mary-Sue, I promise. Ok, the eye coloring is a bit of a stretch, but I know that I've read something about some Egyptians having blue/grey/green eye variations, it's just not common seeing as brown was by far the dominant color. This starts the day that Evy destroys the library and Jonathan presents her with the 'puzzle-box'.

**Disclaimer:** I do not in any way own the Mummy, just my character/s and side plot.

**Warning:** A bit of language in this one

* * *

_Nefertiri stood just beyond the steps of the palace__,__ gazing out at what she could see of the city of Thebes from her slightly raised location__.__ The guards stood silently at their positions__,__ spears erect and shields held firm__.__ Outside of the palace walls the sounds of the commoners wafted through the air__,__ reaching the princess__'__s ears in a jumble of women shouting__,__ men yelling__,__ children screaming__,__ and dogs barking, as they went about their daily business in the market place and around the city__.__ Inside the isolated palace servants quietly bustled about__,__ transporting foodstuffs__,__ perfumes__,__ jewelry__,__ and all sorts of items to different locations within the sprawling structure__.__ Her father__,__ Pharaoh Seti I__,__ would most likely be sitting upon his throne in the center of the palace__,__ more than likely with his mistress Anck-su-namun at his side__.__ The thought of the woman left a bitter taste in Nefertiri__'__s mouth__,__ but that was soon erased as the approaching sound of steady beat of hooves pounding into the hard sand became audible__.__ A delighted smile spread across the princess__'__s face and she ran down the steps__,__ barely conscious of shouting and muffled footsteps hurrying into the palace__.__ She cared for nothing save for reaching the bottom of the steps and joining the rider of the large black horse that was swiftly approaching__._

_Nefertiri was only slightly aware of her father__'__s powerful form coming to a stop beside her along with her eldest brother__,__ Ramses__,__ her focus completely on the rider of the black horse that was finally drawing near__._

"_Meskhenet__!"__ Nefertiri called with a smile__,__ ignoring normal protocols as she ran forward toward the figure that was now dismounting__.__ The rider was a young woman who looked to be around the princess__'__s age and height__,__ with mid-back length black hair__,__ olive skin__,__ blue-grey eyes__,__ an uncommon color for an Egyptian__,__ and who was dressed in the robes of a desert-traveler__.__"__Nefertiri__!"__ The other girl__,__ Meskhenet__,__ cried__,__ appearing equally joyful at seeing the other…_

_

* * *

_Evelyn Carnahan woke with a start. She had been dreaming about Ancient Egypt, not that it was too surprising seeing how she had completely immersed herself in the study of the era since she was a little girl. But it had seemed so life like, as though she had really been the long-dead princess, Nefertiri. She loved having dreams like this; her sub-conscience was so good at depicting Ancient Egypt, especially the life of Nefertiri, the daughter of Seti the First. She supposed it was because of all the books she had read and all the time she had spent wondering what it would have been like to live during the fascinating time period.

Evelyn stretched her arms out and tossed her head as she sat up, her long, brown curls sweeping over her shoulders, bobbing slightly as she moved. She swung her legs over the side of her bed, her white cotton nightgown swinging around her ankles as she stood, yawning and rubbing her bleary hazel eyes. The usual morning noises could be heard outside her shuttered window, the sun peaking in through the cracks in the wooden slats. She stumbled slightly as she wandered absent-mindedly over to the chest of drawers that held her clothes. She shrugged the thin cotton nightgown from her shoulders and struggled into the clothes she normally wore, a white linen blouse and cackey calve-length skirt, as well as a loose ascot, belt, pair of stockings and high-heeled shoes.

Evelyn finished tugging on her shoes and threw her hair up into a controlled bun at the nape of her neck before slipping a pair of glasses onto the bridge of her nose, completing the classic librarian look that she loved to emphasize, seeing as her job was to take care of the library at the Museum of Antiquities; cataloging, sorting, and deciphering the numerous volumes on Ancient Egypt.

She checked her appearance quickly before fetching her pocketbook and stepping out of her room. A handful of dates, snatched up while walking through the main room of her apartment, became her on-the-go breakfast. She left the building, walking briskly in the direction of the museum, skillfully weaving her way through the crowded streets of Cairo. Even so early in the morning the sun was blazing and it was already hot. The tall building eventually came into view, and Evelyn quickly trotted up the steps, mentally filing away that name from her dream, Meskhenet, to be looked up after her morning duties.

* * *

Several hours later Evelyn was just finishing re-shelving some of the books that had been taken out. She still hadn't had a chance to look up the girl's name, but she planned on doing so as soon as she finished with her last stack of tomes.

"Sacred Stones," she muttered to herself as she put each book in its place. "Sculpture and Aesthetics, Socrates, Seth: Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3, and Tut… Tuthmosis? What are you doing here?"

She placed the book under her arm and began scanning the shelves, looking for the letter T.

"T… t, t, t, t!" She finally found it, on the other side of the aisle. "Ah." Placing the three other books onto the shelve that she had been working with, she grasped the odd-book-out. "I'm going to put you where you belong." She said determinedly, while stretching her arm across the gap and hanging onto her ladder with the other. The ladder creaked as she tried to place the book on the other shelve, rocking slightly before coming away from the shelve it had been resting on, standing vertical in the middle of the aisle.

"Ooh!" Evelyn yelped, startled. "Oh, oh!" She continued as the ladder swayed precariously while she tried to balance and figure a way out of the mess she had gotten herself into.

"Help!" She whispered as she tried to remain upright. She made the mistake of glancing down at the floor, and was then sent stumbling, so to speak, into the closest bookcase creating a domino effect, which in turn sent all of the shelves crashing down to the floor.

Evelyn stood shakily and watched as the last bookcases toppled, her eyes wide as she took in the destruction. Books and papers were scattered all around the room. Each and every one of the large bookcases had fallen over, knocking down the one behind it in the process, dumping their contents as they fell. She reached up and slowly removed her glasses. "Oops." She said in a small voice, still in shock.

"What!" A frustrated and angry sounding male voice came from behind her. "How?" The curator of the museum, an older Egyptian man with a balding head, had entered the room after hearing the commotion and was now standing among the remains of the library, mumbling to himself as he tried to figure out how on earth such a thing had happened. Then his eyes found Evelyn.

"Oh look at this!" He exclaimed as he stalked towards her. "Sons of the pharaohs! Give me frogs! Flies! Locusts! Anything but you! Compared to you all the other plagues were a joy!"

"I am so very sorry, it was an accident." Evelyn tried to explain as the curator glared at her.

"Darling girl, when Ramses destroyed Syria, that was an accident. You are a catastrophe! Look at my library! Why do I put up with you?"

"Well, well, y-you put up with me because, um, because I can, I can read and write Ancient Egyptian," Evelyn stammered. "And because I can decipher Hieroglyphics, and hieratic. And, well, well I am the only person within a thousand miles who knows how to properly code and, and catalogue this library, that's why!"

The curator waited for her to finish her tirade before answering his own question. "I put up with you because your father and mother were our finest patrons, that's why! Allah rest their souls. Now, I don't care how you do it, I don't care how long it takes, straighten up this mess!"

He turned and left with one last look at Evelyn, leaving her to the cleaning of the mountainous mess she had created. Evelyn was about to start on her enormous task, when a noise from the adjoining room startled her. She swiftly walked towards the other room, dropping her glasses onto a desk on her way past.

Evelyn entered a room filled with artifacts from Ancient times, sarcophaguses, mummies, statues; a whole assortment of items from raided tombs.

"Hello?" She grabbed one of the many torches that lit the spacious, but cluttered, area and tentatively walked into the room.

"Abdul?" She asked quietly, her voice shaking in fright. "Mohammed?" She kept walking. "Bob?" She jumped as a thump sounded behind her. Her shoes clacked dully against the stone floor, the only noise, save for the flickering of the flames and her own harsh breathing, as she inched towards an open sarcophagus. She leaned over, about to peer into the stone casket.

"Ahhhh!" She screamed as a dried out skeleton of a mummy popped up screeching at her. She was about to turn and run when a man's laughter interrupted her screaming and gasping, followed by said man's legs, torso, and grinning face.

"Have you no respect for the dead?!" Evelyn exclaimed, still partly frightened out of her wits, a feeling that was quickly being replaced by anger towards her immature, and obviously at least partially drunk, useless older brother, Jonathon Carnahan, who was laughing his ass off.

Evelyn moved to put the torch she still held into a holder on the end of the sarcophagus, quickly looking over her shoulder to make sure the curator hadn't heard them. She was in enough trouble as it was.

"Course I do, but sometimes," He put an arm around the mummy, "I'd rather like to join them!"

"Well I wish you'd do it sooner rather than later, "Evelyn told him, still flustered after his prank, "Before you ruin my career the way you've ruined yours." She slapped him lightly. "Now get out!"

"My dear, sweet, baby sister! I'll have you know," He began as he struggled out of the sarcophagus. "That at this precise moment my career is on a high note!"

"High note, ha!" Evelyn spat at him as he supported himself on the stone casket behind him. "Oh Jonathon please! I'm really not in the mood for you, I've just made a bit of a mess in the library, and, and the Bembridge scholars have rejected my application form again. They say I don't have enough experience in the field." She sat dejectedly on the base of a statue.

Jonathon smiled sympathetically and grasped her hands as he sat on his heals in front of her. "You'll always have me, old mum."

Evelyn couldn't help but smile along with her goofy brother. No matter what he did to anger her she couldn't help loving him, they had to stick together after all.

"Besides," he said jumping up and reaching into the sarcophagus. "I have just the thing to cheer you up!"

"Oh no." She said, rolling her eyes as she watched him rummage through the sarcophagus, pulling up one of the mummy's legs as he searched for something. "Not another one of your worthless trinkets. If I have to take one more piece of junk to the curator to try and… sell for you…" She trailed off as Jonathon shoved a small black box under her nose. She slowly took the little box from his hand and began examining it.

"Wh-where did you get this?" She asked, completely entranced by the item.

"On a dig, down in, uh, Thebes." He said. Had she been paying attention to him she might have noticed a slight pause in his explanation, but as it was she was already deciphering the hieroglyphics on the surface and running her fingers down the sides of the box.

"My whole life I've never found anything, Evy, please tell me I found something!"

She suddenly twisted the sides of the box. The top popped open into eight sections revealing a compartment within, a compartment that contained a folded pieced of papyrus paper.

"Jonathon." she said quietly, reaching in to grasp the paper.

"Yes?" He asked breathlessly, watching her every movement.

"I think you found something!" She said excitedly as she removed the ancient paper and unfolded it, revealing what looked to be a map.

* * *

"You see the cartouche there?" Evy asked as the curator examined the map that she had discovered through a jeweler's eyeglass. "It's the official royal seal of Seti the First, I'm sure of it."

"Perhaps." The curator said, setting the eyeglass aside. He sounded nowhere near as enthusiastic as the young English woman.

"Two questions." Jonathon broke in. "Who the hell was Seti the First, and was he rich?"

"He was the second pharaoh of the 19th dynasty, and said to be the wealthiest pharaoh of them all." Evy explained excitement flooding her voice and her eyes practically sparking.

"Good!" Jonathon said, more excited by the promise of wealth than anything else. "I like this fellow, I like him very much."

"I've already dated the map." Evy told the curator, ever the historian and Egyptologist. "It's almost 3,000 years old, and if you look at the hieratic just here, well, it's Hamunaptra."

"Dear girl, don't be ridiculous! We're scholars, not treasure hunters! Hamunaptra's a myth told by ancient Arab story-tellers to amuse Greek and Roman tourists."

"Yes, yes I know all the silly blather about the city being protected by the curse of a mummy nonsense, but my research has led me to believe that the city itself may have actually existed." Evy insisted, not to be deterred.

"Are we talking about _the_ Hamunaptra?" Jonathon asked, even more interested than before.

"Yes, the City of the Dead. Where the earliest pharaohs were said to have hidden the wealth of Egypt."

"Yes, yes i-in a big, underground treasure chamber." Jonathon muttered, rubbing his hands together as he imagined pile upon pile of gold.

"Ha!" The curator scoffed from his desk.

"Oh come on, everybody knows the story. The entire necropolis was rigged to sink into the sand at the Pharaohs command; a flick of the switch and the whole place would disappear beneath the sand dunes, taking the treasure with it."

"As the Americans would say, it's all fairy tales and hokum. Oh my goodness!" The curator exclaimed as the map, which he had conveniently held close to the lamp on his desk, burst into flame. He tossed the burning map off his desk and it landed on the floor. The Carnahan siblings rushed forward, desperate to save the valuable papyrus, but they were too late.

"You've burnt it! You've burnt off the part with the lost city!" Jonathan exclaimed, horrified.

"It's for the best I'm sure. Many men have wasted their lives in the foolish pursuit of Hamunaptra. No one's ever found it. Most have never returned." The curator ended ominously.

* * *

"Don't worry Evy, old girl!" Jonathon said as they trudged down the steps of the museum, the map and puzzle-box safely in their possession once more. "I might have another way of getting there, I think I know of someone who might know something about that box."

"Really? And how do you know this?" The younger sibling asked suspiciously.

Jonathan looked mildly uncomfortable under her penetrating gaze. "Well, um, uh, how about we go see him right now?" The older Carnahan answered weakly, dodging the question as he did so. Luckily, Evy let it go.

"We can't today Jonathan, or did you forget?" Evy asked, giving him another pointed look.

"Forget, forget what? What did I forget?" Jonathan inquired, his voice raising an octave as his sister's fierce glare went through him. She continued to glare at him for a bit before sighing.

"Victoria is arriving today, remember? We promised to meet her at the wharf."

Jonathon looked startled. "Little Ria get's here today?"

"Yes, now let's hurry, we don't want to be late!"

* * *

Victoria Carnahan stood on the deck of the steamer as it chugged towards Cairo, which was finally in sight. It had been a long hard trip from England, but after feeling the warm Egyptian sun on her face, and the pleasantly dry air on her skin, she felt that it was definitely worth it.

Her cousins, Jonathan and Evelyn Carnahan would be waiting on the wharf, she hadn't seen either of them in years, and she wondered if Jonathan was still the gangly, goofy kid in an adult's body, and if Evelyn was still the same spunky bookworm with an adventurous streak. As the boat drew nearer to shore, she looked down, checking to make sure she had all of her belongings with her. A gentle breath of air blew some of her long hair into her face and she absent-mindedly pushed it behind her ear as she scanned the wharf for her cousins.

* * *

On shore, Jonathan and Evy watched the steamer approach. Neither could see their cousin, but the deck was crowded so it wasn't that strange. They resigned themselves to wait for her to come off the boat.

Victoria, or Ria, was the daughter of their father's brother and his wife, who was an Egyptian like their own mother. She, like them, had grown up in a household obsessed with Ancient Egypt. She was just as knowledgeable on the subject as Evy, being able to read and write in Ancient Egyptian as well decipher Hieroglyphics and Hieratic. Her parents had been killed in the same accident that had taken the sibling's parents from them. She would have already been living with the siblings, but she had decided to finish her education at the university before returning to Egypt.

"How old is little Ria now?" Jonathan asked as they watched a boarding ramp being attached to the ship.

"She's 22, hardly little now."

Jonathan scoffed. "What are you talking about, she'll always be little."

Their conversation ended when a familiar dark-haired girl made her way down the ramp and headed toward them.

She had changed quiet a bit since the last time they had seen her. She was about Evy's height; her hair was a bit darker and longer, though with less curls, more of a slight wave. She had the same skin color and sweet face. She had filled out, no longer the awkward teenager, but a blooming young woman. The only major difference between the girls was that unlike Evy's hazel-brown eyes, Ria's were a bluish-grey, wolf-eyes, as her father had teasingly called them when she was younger.

"Evy! Jonathan!" The younger girl called out as she neared them. Jonathan ran forward and grabbed her slim figure, swinging her around in the air while she laughed. "Ria! Look at you!" Evy joined them after walking at a more ladylike pace, but immediately embraced her cousin in a bear hug when she reached her. "I'm so glad you're here!" She exclaimed happily.

"Me too!" Ria agreed with her softer voice, "It's so good to be home."

Jonathan took hold of her bags in a rare show of gentlemanliness. The three Carnahans walked back to the apartment that Evy and Jonathan were staying in, talking and catching up, Hamunaptra pushed to the back of the sibling's minds till later on.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Well there you have it. And next chapter we'll be introduced to the dashing Rick O'Connell and the stinky Warden. Ardeth won't be making an appearance until probably the third chapter. I'll try to write the next one as soon as possible, but I'm so completely bogged down in schoolwork that it probably wasn't a good idea to go on and write this. Oh well, I couldn't help myself. Fanfiction is much more enjoyable compared to writing essays.

Please tell me what you thought of it! I'd love to have your opinions and suggestions, so please feel free to drop a review!


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